On Forest Nenets Narrative Genres Eva Toulouze To cite this version: Eva Toulouze. On Forest Nenets Narrative Genres . Studies in Folk Culture, Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, Department of Ethnology, University of Tartu, 2004, Songs and Stories, Magic and Law pp.36-64. hal-01283836 HAL Id: hal-01283836 https://hal-inalco.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01283836 Submitted on 7 Mar 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. 1 Eva Toulouze On Forest Nenets narrative genres I. Research on Forest Nenets The Forest Nenets are a small people of maximum 2000 persons living in the North- Eastern Ob basin, in taiga and forest tundra areas. This ethnic group has long been neglected by ethnographic as well as linguistic research: they live mostly in remote zones on the high stream of different rivers (Ob tributaries flowing both North-South1 and East-West2 as well as rivers flowing into the Ob bay (flowing South-North3). The access to their territory is thus complicated, and much determination is needed to get near to them. Oh the other hand, researchers have been concentrating their efforts since the 19th century on the Tundra Nenets, a close ethnic group, or more precisely the main branch of the same people. The Tundra Nenets occupy a huge territory in Northern Russia, from the Kola Peninsula up to the Taimyr Peninsula in Central Siberia, covering thus thousands of kilometres of European and Siberian tundra. They have maintained a strong identity consciousness, based on reindeer herding, and they still live in some regions fairly as they did at the beginning of the 20th century4. The Forest Nenets‟ culture and way of life is very different and depends on different ecological environment: reindeer herding is practised on a lesser scale, the Nenets – instead of being nomads all year round – are but semi-nomads, and the function of other activities as hunting and fishing is much more extensive than in the tundra. Linguistic analysis shows that the language spoken by both groups is structurally the same, and linguists they have considered Forest Nenets as a mere dialect. Nevertheless phonetic dissimilarity between these forms is such, that mutual understanding between Forest and Tundra Nenets is just excluded. Moreover, as Forest Nenets is under the influence of its neighbouring languages, Khanty and Selkup, the lexical divergence is also very significant. Therefore the present trend among linguists dealing with Samoyed languages is to identify not one, but two independent Nenets languages, subdivided into dialects. There are three main territories inhabited by Forest Nenets: the larger group occupies high and central flows of the Pur, whose two main tributaries are called Pyako-Pur and Ayvaseda- 1 The Nazym and the Lyamin (nowadays this last community seems to be very small), the Agan and its tributaries the Vatyogan and the Amputa. 2 The Kazym. 3 The Nadym and the Pur, with their tributaries. 4 Such are for instance the Nenets groups living in the Yamal Peninsula: in this area, soviet collectivisation was not achieved before the 1950-ies (Niglas 1998, 1999). 2 Pur, the first element of these names being the names of two Forest Nenets clans. The centre of this region is the village of Tarko-Sale, which, according to visitors, is still a genuine Forest Nenets village, where even children speak Nenets among themselves5. During the Soviet period, here as well as everywhere in the Northern areas, indigenous peoples formerly living in the forest have been gathered in villages: in this area, the main Forest Nenets villages are Kharampur and Khalesovaya, where, according to Tapani Salminen, who has visited this region in 1998, Forest Nenets traditional culture is still alive. The second group lives westwards, on the high flows of the Nadym and the Kazym rivers. They are concentrated around the village of Num-to, on the shore of a lake considered both by the local Khantys and the Nenets as a sacred place. This region has still been spared by industrialisation: traditional rules are still dominant, children speak Nenets, motor sledges are still a luxury6. The third group lives on the high flow of the Agan and its tributaries, Vatyogan and Amputa; during the first third of the 20th century, families from Halesovaya migrated down to this zone, where fish and pastures were abundant. But since the mid 1960, oil industry has massively taken root in this region. This fact has most directly influenced the Forest Nenets‟ way of life as well as the ethnic contacts in this area. Some of the indigenous families are ready to give up their lands for oil extraction in exchange of different kind of compensations. Others are trying to resist this penetration and fight in order to protect nature from pollution, to save the seriously threatened reindeer pastures and the forest, which provides them with food and, overall, with life. Moreover, the Agan Forest Nenets were even before this invasion in a weaker position, for they have always been fewer than the Khanties. Now the arrival of oil workers coming from all the regions of the former USSR has led to a clear demographic unbalance to the prejudice of the indigenous peoples. In this area, Forest Nenets has lost ground: in 1999, the younger Nenets speaking Nenets as a mother tongue was aged 23. As far as I know, no child speaks either understands it: it is practised actively only by the elder generation7. The information available about the Forest Nenets is quite limited, as this ethnic group has been identified as such only at the end of the 19th century. The older data are to be found in M.-A. Castrén‟s travels reports. The Finnish explorer and linguist had also collected Forest Nenets language samples (Castrén 1940, Castrén 1960). His work has been continued and systematised by Toivo Lehtisalo, who spent at the beginning of the 20th century much time making fieldwork among both the Tundra and the Forest Nenets. In 1914, Lehtisalo worked among the Western Forest Nenets on the river Kiselyovskaya and collected precious samples of oral traditions (Lehtisalo 1947, Lehtisalo 1960). The ethnographic information he received from very impressive informants, as the blind shaman Kalyat Ngahany, has been used by Lehtisalo in his general studies on Nenets culture (Lehtisalo 5 Personal communication by Tapani Salminen (may 2001). 6 My conversations with Vadim and Taysya Pyak (February 2000), as well as Kaur Mägi‟s fieldwork (september-october 2001). 7 My own fieldwork 2-4/1999, 9-10/1999, 8-10/2000. 3 1924) and language (Lehtisalo 1956). Most of the data available at the moment are due to the Finnish researcher. Later, after the October Revolution, Russian researchers took over Nenets studies. One of the most competent specialists on Samoyed peoples and languages was G. Verbov, young scholar who did not survive World War II: he has been the first to publish a substantial article (Verbov 1936) about the Forest Nenets. Mainly a linguist, he collected data about the language and left to posterity a monograph on this subject, published thirty years after his death (Verbov 1973). This work includes two short tales. Russian ethnographers later on have made occasionally field work by the Forest Nenets, but although L. Homič (1972) on one hand and more recently A. Golovnev (1995) have inserted data among them in more general issues, very few specific research has been dedicated to this topic. Among the linguists, the Finn Pekka Sammallahti (1974) has done a major work with his grammar of Forest Nenets, based on cooperation with a Leningrad student, born half Nenets half Selkup, who provided him with two texts (42 sentences). Sammallahti presents them with extensive and useful comments. Finally two Hungarian scholars, P. Hajdú (1959a, 1959b) and J. Pusztay (1984), have abundantly used Lehtisalo‟s material for linguistic analysis. This survey shows that the last extensive collection of Forest Nenets language and folklore dates from the very beginning of the 20th century. Therefore in 2000, a working group from Tartu University8 (Estonia) has undertaken to fill this gap and started systematic fieldwork research, whose final aim is to provide a collection of Forest Nenets texts with morphological analysis and translation. The first expedition took place in autumn 2000 and lasted two months. We worked in the Agan region, but we had also the opportunity of working very thoroughly with a remarkable informant9 from Num-to. This first expedition was directly followed by the visit of two Forest Nenets10 to Tartu, where they recorded several hours of folklore11 - songs, tales and other forms of oral tradition. A second expedition (Kaur Mägi) took place in autumn 2001 in Num-to region These materials have been partly published, i.e. in the booklet accompaning a CD of Forest Nenets songs (Mägi, Ojamaa, Toulouze 2002). The present article is based on these materials. 8 Formed by an Estonian linguist, Kaur Mägi and myself. 9 Tatva Logany. 10 Tatva Logany and Yuri Vella. 11 This expedition was supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment (Eesti Kultuurkapital) and the Endangered Languages Fund, and the invitation for the Nenets informants was delivered by the Estonian National Museum (Eesti Rahva Muuseum). Juri Vella and Tatva Logany spent two weeks in Tartu.